’50 Shades! The Musical’ @ Palace, 4/30/14

’50 Shades! The Musical — The Original Parody’ funny but overwhelmed by space at Palace

By Steve Barnes

ALBANY — Parodying a book as silly and badly written as E.L. James’ megaselling “Fifty Shades of Grey” almost seems redundant. It’s already a self-parody, full of lines like, “My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves,” and “‘Miss Steele, you are not just a pretty face. You’ve had six orgasms so far and all of them belong to me.'”

But “50 Shades! The Musical — The Original Parody,” which played Wednesday night to a small audience at the Palace Theatre, gives it the old college try, and it’s a decent romp.

“College” is used advisedly: The show looks and feels like the work of inspired undergraduates. The set, in its entirety, is little more than a bed/couch and a few cubes/stools, and the band consists of just drums, bass and keyboards. The cast has nine members, but three of them do little more than strut about in skimpy attire. The whole production travels in a single Greyhound-style bus.

The plot, such as it is, starts with three college women considering titles for their book club. After rejecting “Martha Stewart’s Cooking Soup for One” (“Soup is very comforting when you’re (dumped),” says one) and “The Diary of Anne Frank” (“I liked the beginning,” says another, “but I hated the end”), they choose James’ she-porn, which a shadow cast acts out as they work their way through the book.

The characters are caricatures anyway, and the cast has fun with them. Alexis Field is hilarious as the sexually exuberant if dim Katherine, who’s a roommate of the virginal Anastasia Steele, the woman destined to become ensnared by the mysterious Christian Grey; Nick Semar is a comical Latin lover as Jose (or “Jo-zay,” as Katherine puts it); and Tiffany Dissette and Sheila O’Connor give suitably cartoonish performances as female friends. Eileen Patterson is fine as Steele, but the show’s only truly outrageous choice is the way Jack Boice portrays Grey, who in the book is smoldering and aloof. Boice parades around an early scene in a wrestling singlet, his big belly spilling out, and with his fastidiousness and his preening and his feathered hair, it’s obvious to everyone but him and Steele that he’s gay, even if he does enthusiastically put his head between her thighs and make motorboat sounds.

The book, music and lyrics, credited to a half-dozen creators, are serviceable pastiches of comic lines and X-rated celebrations of discovery and carnality. To wit: “The hole inside of me keeps getting moister./Would someone please put a pearl deep inside my oyster?”

It’s all amusing and racy, but the production belongs in a far smaller theater than the Palace — maybe Capital Rep’s 300-seat house, or even a cabaret room holding 150. In its current form, “50 Shades! The Musical” gets lost on a big stage. The ideas, the music and the performances are too small to fill the space, and the effect is profoundly diluted.